Agree with the author that academia sometimes focusses on a very narrow band of research topics, which might or might not improve end user experience. Also, agree with the author that personalized news has very interesting NLP+Machine Learning problems.

However, I am not convinced that personalized news is what users wants, and whether users want to discover popular news and articles by serendipity, socially, rather than personalization by algorithms. Further, I think personalized news has very limited opportunity for generating significant revenue.